There's a tyranny of designers, they must be stopped. Their "beautiful" designs have infected everything and now everything is all super-low data-density, full-screen interstitials, and hero units!

  > Having worked in and on Visual Studio, it's a great example of what happens when you build an interface that allows the user to do anything, and the developer to add anything. Immensely powerful, but 95% of the functionality is rarely if ever used, training is difficult because of the breadth and pace of change, and discovery is impossible.

I feel like the only power user in the world who liked this design. Yeah VS is big and scary but I disagree with your comments on discoverability. I learned to program on VB6 and then early VS.NET and I discovered features in either just fine. There was a standard protocol for getting to know big hairy beasts like VS or 3DS or FLStudio: set aside a week to play around, click everything in the menus to see what happens, and then come up with a goal and figure out how to achieve it. VS was dense but never stood in my way in this regard. (Though I could say the complete opposite about the documentation, with its dense, verbose style and unique, Microsoft vocabulary)